By David

The comments posted on the Melissa Ingram story made interesting reading. I don’t know whether Swimwatch makes a difference or not. I suspect readers comments carry more weight in Wellington than what I say. The author can easily be written off as “he’s always been a trouble maker.” Fitting Tom and Sensible Swimming and Stevie into the same throw away likeness is more difficult; especially when Tom and Sensible Swimming and Stevie so often express views different from those in the main article. Certainly Swimwatch – with a healthy diet of comments – has turned out to be good for swimming.

The sport is going through a period of being badly managed by a Butler, Wrightson, McDonald, Cull and Byrne; five individuals who know nothing about the industry they lead. And it shows. It’s the reason they keep making mistakes like the open water prize money fiasco. People with a deep understanding of elite swimming would not make those errors. The CEO of SPARC, Peter Miskimmin, has backed a bunch of losers. The first rule of good management is to pick good people. Miskimmin has failed that test. In this case he has more than failed. Swimming people on the Swimming New Zealand Board voted four votes to three to get rid of Butler and Wrightson. Miskimmin ordered the vote overturned. Democracy clearly has no standing in his world. At that moment the position of Butler and Wrightson changed. They are no longer Board appointed independent directors. They are servants of Peter Miskimmin, hired to do his bidding. SPARC now has four representatives on the SNZ Board, two observers and two voting members. SPARC runs the sport. All I can hope is that one day Miskimmin is held responsible for the mess he has created. What he did to this Board’s vote is inexcusable dictatorship.

Some readers may have noticed that Swimwatch has been silent on the subject of Auckland Regional Swimming. Normally there would be some comment on an administrative shortcoming. But no, not in the case of Auckland. Why is that, you may wonder? Well, and much to my surprise, Auckland Swimming is bloody well run. I’ve coached here for eighteen months and Auckland is as well run as the best I’ve seen. Brian Palmer does a good job. The Auckland Board do a good job. Sure, I could moan about some small issues, such as holding Championship meets in November. When it’s time to prepare for the summer racing season Auckland puts on two Championships. It is crazy. However all that is insignificant in comparison to the terrific job the rulers of Auckland Swimming do in managing the sport. New Zealand Swimming would be a better place if Peter Miskimmin was appointed grounds man at the National Hockey Stadium in Berhampore and Brian Palmer and the Auckland Board pitched their tents inside Pelorus House for six months.

For example, about two minutes ago I got a text message from Auckland Swimming. There is a swim meet on in Auckland this afternoon. It is one of the Championships I was complaining about earlier in this post. One of our swimmers was disqualified. Unfortunately Coach Kimberly had left the pool just before the disqualification came to light. The Auckland text asked if I was happy for the disqualification to be processed without the required coaching signature. I agreed, but most of all I was left with the thought that here was an organisation that went the extra mile. Florida Gold Coast Swimming do most things very well, but you’d wait a bloody long time to get a disqualification slip out of them in the same circumstances. I happen to know that’s true. At a JO Meet in Coral Springs, Rhi Jeffrey and I once tried in vain to get a slip of any sort. Anyway, Auckland Swimming – thank you.

And now to the subject of this article – The Good Guys Gather. Tomorrow afternoon I have to collect Lara from Manukau. She is arriving on something scarily called, “The Naked Bus.” She’s coming to Auckland to live and swim at West Auckland Aquatics. Her text message this afternoon tells me she’s having trouble packing. I can well imagine that is true. She says her mother has told her to “keep it simple”. Good advice but, I suspect, also very futile.
From Manukau bus station we move on to Auckland Airport to collect Rhi who has been home to Boston for Thanksgiving. In one weekend, a General Election and the return of Rhi; that’s a lot for one small country to handle.
Jess has finished her final year of High School exams; calculus, which she tells me “wasn’t too bad.” I am concerned though. I did hear her talking about a swimmer she met during the recent World Cup meets in Singapore and Beijing. I got the impression this example of all that’s best in swimming came from a nation in the south of Africa.
Nikki returns to New Zealand from a holiday in California. With all that she has been through the break will have done her well.

Abigail has stolen a march on her team mates and has used the final week of her holiday to swim 100 kilometres.
And Bekki, looking tanned and incredibly fit and sporting a new short blonde hair style, that suits her, has arrived back from Boulder, Colorado. She competed in the elite section of the Auckland World Cup triathlon and is now preparing for races later in the New Zealand summer.

The rest of us have enjoyed our final week of holiday. A holiday before what, you may ask? Well, on Monday we begin the build up to the New Zealand Olympic Trials being held in Auckland from 25 March to 30 March 2012. We are aiming to take a team of nine to the trials. It is an important event for West Auckland Aquatics. How successful we are will be determined by what happens in this next eight weeks. We have five swimmers aiming at or close to 100 kilometres a week through the eight weeks. As long as it is swum at a firm pace we should have a good championship. In eight weeks I will let you know how they have done. Get on, that is, through the 100x100s, the 8000 medleys, the 10,000 straight swims, the 6×1000 and 4×1500. On Monday they have 10,000 metres swimming, 30 minutes of heavy weights and 20 minutes running in the morning and 8000 metres swimming in the afternoon. All the stuff that the critics say will see them into early retirement – all the stuff that might just win them a swimming race sometime between the 25 and the 30 March next year.

By David

Few Swimwatch articles have resulted in the amount of comment generated by the post on Scott Talbot’s aerobic training and our 8000 meter medley set. It is relevant to confirm Rhi’s observation that the 8000 meter swim was swum by only four swimmers on our team recently, three of whom were Open National Championship standard. In fact one was an Olympic Gold Medallist and a second was a Nationals “A” finalist. It might be stretching things a bit to blame this particular session for all Swimming New Zealand’s membership ills. Perhaps ironically, has anyone noticed that swimming’s membership retention problems have increased in direct proportion to introduction of trendy new training programs designed to make the sport “fun”? It seems the fun idea might not be working. Perhaps young people joining a swimming club are looking for success as their brand of fun. A few 25 meter sprints in training are unlikely to give them the success or the quality of fun that they really want.

The fourth swimmer completing last week’s 8000 meters medley is fifteen and currently swims in New Zealand’s Division Two level of competition. She’s one of those rare characters who thrive and prosper on a diet of distance. In the last six weeks she has swum 85, 85, 101, 90, 90 and 90 kilometres. She’s also in the gym three times a week lifting pretty impressive weights. And I would defy anyone to describe this young woman as anything but committed and excited by her journey through swimming. However even she surprised me this morning. Her training day was planned as 10,000 meters in the morning and 8000 in the afternoon. The morning session was 3×1000, 10×200, 1×1000 kick, 20×100, 1×1000 kick, 500 swim, 500 kick. That’s an aerobic session. The afternoon session was not a lot different. Unfortunately the afternoon session was in doubt. A parents’ meeting meant she would not be able to get to the pool. But there was a solution. Could she, I was asked, swim both the morning and afternoon sessions in the morning? After all it was only 18,000 meters. If she began at 5.30am she’d be done by 10.30am. This was entirely her idea.

What would you have done? I have no doubt there are the doubters out there predicting all sorts of ruin; broken shoulders and broken spirits. I questioned the sense of it all for two minutes. Then I thought of Lydiard, Quax, Jullian and others running up to 200 miles a week in pursuit of their dream. Who was I to deny their swimming likeness? Well, all that was early this morning. At 11.30am I got a text message. It said, “I did the 18 btw. I think I might come in and do another 8 tonight. Just kidding!”

There is something really good about that story; a young woman setting her own goals, meeting her own challenges and winning. Hopefully she will be successful in competition as well. However whatever her race results might be she knows, I know and her parent’s know she has set herself goals of a Phelps and Lochte standard and she has prevailed. No one will ever take that away from her. Of course she should have swum the 18,000.

When I first came back to New Zealand after seven years in the United States I was told to forget all that distance stuff. New Zealand swimmers will never do it they said. I don’t believe that. The spirit of Jelley, Lydiard, Snell, Quax and Walker is as alive and well today as it ever was. I’ve seen today’s generation do some remarkable things.

Jane Copland swam 800 meters without stopping when she was three, also because she chose to. I am not sure what drives a child (it was a couple of days before her fourth birthday) to do such a thing, but I certainly was not the cause. She had learned that 800m was half a mile and she decided she wanted to swim that far, without stopping. She did 1000 kilometres in ten weeks when she was sixteen and won her first National Open Championship the following season. Toni Jeffs twice reached 1000 kilometres in ten weeks. Even Nichola Chellingworth who was no great lover of distance conditioning regularly reached 900 kilometres in a ten week build up. Every week Rhi Jeffrey swims in excess of 80 kilometres. National Open finalist Jessica Marston is always around 90 kilometres a week. The American, Joseph Skuba, a 50 second LC 100 meter swimmer, swam over 900 kilometres in all his build-ups. And of course Abigail has just swum 18 kilometres in one training session. None of these swimmers are injured or broken. All of them were or are fine athletes. Yes there is plenty of evidence to suggest the doubters are wrong.

I think it is reasonable to leave the final view on this subject to Dr. Peter Snell. He is now a world authority on the physical effects of exercise and for several years was not too bad at its practice either.

Arthur Lydiard based stock in his elaborate schedules. He talked about balancing the training. My conclusion is that the details were relative unimportant though I didn’t realize that until 1962. That was when I did his schedule and trained right through when I ran my World Records when I ‘wasn’t supposed to’ based on the schedule. Like Marty Liquori said, all you need is a decent base, some leg turnover work and a lot of the scientific stuff is bullshit. Many American runners run themselves into the ground because that is what the coaches think they need to do. When you have done distance for many months you feel that you have lost your speed so many runners stopped the Lydiard distance and started doing a bunch of speed work and they raced well. Then they concluded that since they saw the light they don’t need the distance work. Then the following season without the base they don’t race so well.

Later on as a scientist I learned that the benefits of distance running are achieved after muscle glycogen depletion. So if you run for two hours a lot of the slow-twitch muscle fibers which were initially recruited run out of glycogen and cannot contract any more. Eventually you use the fast twitch muscle fibers which you normally only use when running fast, so that was a stunning revelation foe me. I didn’t know that when I was running my 22-milers. I just knew that the quality of my build-up work had a great relation to how I raced later on the track.

I tried to run everything evenly so we didn’t do those sessions where a runner gets faster as he progresses. I also didn’t do sessions where I went from 200 meters to 400 meters to 600 meters and back down. I think those are little tricks that coaches use to justify their existence. It’s all bullshit. As long as you get an endurance base and avoid the pitfalls of overtraining you will improve. The ideal training is the maximum amount of race related pace running you can do without overtraining. That implies that you must have the base before to allow you to avoid overtraining.

By David

Coach Kimberly is the very good West Auckland Aquatic’s Assistant Coach. She will be horrified when she discovers I have written this story. It would be difficult to find a more pacific and gentle human being. Please do not attribute to her the shortcomings of those she works with and who write for an internet swimming blog.

Coach Kimberly recently took part in a Swimming New Zealand coaching accreditation course. Part of the weekend program involved watching the Millennium Institute’s coaches take a training session. When the course ended I was interested to hear what she had seen and learned.

She mentioned that she was surprised at the difference between the “aerobic” training used in our program and the “aerobic” training demonstrated at the Millennium Institute. I asked if she had an example of an aerobic schedule used on her course. Could I see it? She did have an example. Here is what had been written on the Millennium Institute’s white board. This is what Scott Talbot, New Zealand’s senior performance swimming coach, paid by the state purse, gave to the swimmers on the course as an aerobic training schedule.

AM: AEROBIC AND SKILLS

4×150 – 50 free and 50 fist closed and 50 free or back – sc take 1 less every 150

2×100 – kick NB on 4 positions

2×150 – back 6 underwater kicks off the walls, good streamlines and breakouts

2×100 – kick NB on 4 positions

2×150 – Pull Buoy, 100 moderate and 50 breathe 5 hard

8×25 – fins, odd underwater 15 fast, even dead start flags to flags sprint

Aerobic: Heart Rate 50 beats below maximum

1×200 – on 3.00 then 4×50 # 1 drill main stroke

2×200 – on 2.55 then 4×50 “King Fish” tumble main stroke

3×200 – on 2.50 then 4×50 free jump outs

4×200 – on 2.45 then 4×50 sprint middle 20 meters as a “King Fish” tumble

Dives and skills

I could see the reason for Coach Kimberly’s confusion. Aerobic conditioning at West Auckland Aquatics is based on the teachings of Lydiard and Jelley. I began my coaching career in a sport where aerobic conditioning meant spending three hours running at a firm pace through the Waitakere Ranges, or along forest trails in Boulder, Colorado or down a dusty road in Kenya’s Rift Valley. What did Scott Talbot’s fruit salad mix of interval repetitions have to do with that sort of international aerobic conditioning? The answer, of course, is not a damn thing!

Most certainly aerobic means the same thing in the world of swimming as it does in running. The problems highlighted by Scott Talbot’s program are specific to the Millennium Institute. All New Zealand swimming coaches should not be tarnished by what goes on over there. Scott Talbot’s program is not aerobic training. The author is clearly having a joke with his swimmers or has no idea what the word aerobic means.

I do not know whether Scott Talbot has ever been taught the meaning of aerobic. While Wikipedia may not be the soundest source of coaching information, Scott Talbot could learn a thing or two by reading its definition of aerobic exercise. It is pretty accurate.

“Aerobic exercise is physical exercise of relatively low intensity and long duration, which depends primarily on the aerobic energy system. Aerobic means “with oxygen”, and refers to the use of oxygen in the body’s metabolic or energy-generating process. Many types of exercise are aerobic, and by definition are performed at moderate levels of intensity for extended periods of time.”

As you can see the emphasis is on low or moderate levels of intensity for long or extended periods of time. There is none of that in Scott Talbot’s program. In fact, it is full of expressions common to tough anaerobic training programs. For example:

1. Breathe every five strokes hard. Scott Talbot even underlines the word hard in case we hadn’t got the point that he, alone in the world, thinks that 2×150 done hard fits comfortably into an aerobic training schedule.
2. 8×25 underwater 15 meters fast. I didn’t notice the word fast in Wikipedia’s definition. Come to think of it, in ten years of listening to Lydiard and Jelley discuss the importance of aerobic training I never heard them use the word fast. Scott Talbot clearly knows something these two missed.
3. Dead start, flags to flags sprint. Now here’s something new – aerobic sprints. Scott Talbot introduces the world to swimming’s version of the attraction of opposites.
4. 4×50 jump outs. This exercise involves sprinting 25 meters, climbing out to run around the starting block and sprinting 25 meters back down the pool. Even the most generous Millennium supporter might find that stretching the definition of low intensity for a long duration. It will be valuable though, when sprinting around the starting blocks becomes an Olympic event.
5. Sprint middle 20 meters as a “King Fish” tumble. A “King Fish” turn involves diving under the water at the flags, turning under the water and swimming to the flags again before coming back to the surface. Aerobic primarily means “with oxygen”. I’m not sure why Scott Talbot would include an exercise clearly designed to deprive the swimmer of oxygen in a program that he twice labels “aerobic”.
6. Even the idea of descending a set of 200s is hard to characterize as truly aerobic.

The good news is that Scott Talbot includes a definition of aerobic swimming in his program. He says swimmers should hold a heart rate of 50 beats below their maximum. That’s a pretty good guide. A swimmer with a maximum heart rate of 210 beats per minute should stay under 160. What is impossible of course is to “sprint” the “hard”, “fast”, “King Fish”, “jump out” intervals in Scott Talbot’s program and still be under a 160 beats a minute heart rate.

All this wouldn’t be too bad if the only people affected were the swimmers at the Millennium Institute. Surely they know enough about swimming to realize they are being asked to do aerobic schedules that are not what their coach says they are. I asked Olympic gold medalist, Rhi Jeffrey, if Scott Talbot’s program met her understanding of an aerobic schedule. I thought she was going to die laughing.

The really sad aspect of a program like this is that Scott Talbot is employed by SNZ to tutor young coaches. Let’s hope he researches the meaning of “aerobic” before he tries to convince the next class of trainee coaches that 8×25 meter sprints is a sound bit of aerobic conditioning. Anyone paying $400 or so for their Bronze coaching accreditation has a right to expect better than the nonsense he dished up on this occasion. Last Wednesday morning our swim team did an aerobic program. It was our version of a 24 mile run through the Waitakere Ranges. Many coaches will not like what we did or think it was necessary. They are entitled to that view. What cannot be argued is whether it was authentic aerobic conditioning; warm up 1000 kick, main set 1×8000 IM, warm down 1000 kick. I first saw that schedule swum by Phillippa Langrell at a training camp in Blenheim. Her coach knew the meaning of aerobic.

By David

It’s good when Swimwatch receive a comment that questions a concept or idea that we hold dear. Readers may have noticed a comment posted on the article about the New Zealand Age Group Championships. It asked some searching questions about Lydiard type swimming training. Best of all, the correspondent made the inquiry in a positive manner. This article will seek to answer those questions. The comment began with the following sentence.

While visiting Auckland Champs last year I took down a few of your sessions and cannot work out what they are trying to achieve. These were the sessions.

A Lydiard program is divided into three sections. Each section focuses on developing some physiological characteristic required in a competitive swimming race. Ten weeks is spent developing a swimmer’s aerobic fitness. Four weeks is spent working on the swimmers anaerobic capacity and ten weeks is spent on the speed work and trials required to race well. The sessions you have recorded all happen to be in the ten weeks of aerobic conditioning. As you can see they involve a lot of long swims and usually total around ten or twelve thousand meters. They might be long but they are certainly not slow distance. I have coached several female swimmers who have swum sets of 20×400 in 4.45. One of them is an Olympic Gold Medalist and is swimming at West Auckland Aquatics right now. What is important though is they swim that distance at that speed aerobically, without going into oxygen deficit; something their anaerobically overtrained competition could never manage. Whatever their racing distances they bring a fit well conditioned body to the next two “race specific” stages of their training.

The goal for a senior swimmer is to swim around 100 kilometers a week through this ten week period. You will hear many critics say that’s too far, or it’s “garbage yardage” or it’s old fashioned. However these critics seem to conveniently forget that Phelps, Lochte, Weir, Bernard, Manaudou and a string of other world record holders or Olympic Champions swim this distance in their conditioning period. Old fashioned or not it seems to have worked for these guys. Even swimmers who now do much smaller distances in training have a background of distance conditioning in their early years. Torres and Coughlin are the best examples.

“I listened to what you said to the kids, which wasn’t much (did you have other talks off poolside before the sessions?) – with anything you can look at something but don’t always see what’s actually going on.”

It is of the utmost importance that swimmers know why they are swimming a set. It would be a very cruel coach that asked someone to swim 10,000 meters without providing an explanation of why that distance was important. Once swimmers understand the reason then they prefer to be left alone to get the distance done. Certainly they do not need me bleating in their ear every 100 meters or so. In that regard swimming is one of the world’s most over coached sports. Obviously when the team is doing stroke correction training then the amount of talking increases. None of the sessions you noticed were stroke correction sessions.

I was so concerned that swimmers I coach understood the philosophy and reasoning behind the training they were being asked to swim that I wrote two books on the subject – “Swim to the Top” and “Swimming – A Training Program”. Both books are sold on Amazon.com and can also be bought through bookstores in New Zealand. They were published by Meyer & Meyer the huge German sports book publishers. “Swim to the Top” actually reached number seven on the Amazon.com best selling water sports books shortly after its publication. The purpose of the books was to provide a thorough explanation of how each stage of a Lydiard program worked. All the sessions noted in your Swimwatch question are recorded and explained in “Swimming – A Training Program”. I refer to that book every day.

Most importantly both books clarify why a Lydiard program such as mine chooses to address the different types of conditioning require to swim fast in clearly different stages. Many coaches have programs that involve long aerobic sets or anaerobic sets or speed work. Most coaches however tend to mix these up over shorter periods than ten, four and ten weeks. Lydiard was a strict believer in addressing one fitness category at a time. He thought that produced a better physiological result.

“I heard second hand that these are normal sessions for your groups.”

The sessions you noticed on our white board are normal for my squads during the buildup conditioning ten weeks. They are not at all representative of the training swum during the anaerobic or speed work sections of the program. Today for example the senior swimmers swan 2000 meters of mixed warm up swimming, followed by 10×25 hard swims with long rest, 6×25 hard kick sprints and ended with 1000 mixed warm down. That’s probably a shorter faster session than most so called sprint coaches would set.

Of course that’s a defining characteristic of a Lydiard program. When it’s time to do aerobic conditioning Lydiard goes further and harder than the others. When it’s time to do speed conditioning a Lydiard program does that shorter and better than the sprint coaches. He called it, providing a balanced program. It is impossible to look at the sessions used in one period and describe them as normal for the program as a whole. The fact that some critics mischaracterize the program as all one type of training is simply a problem of perception. It’s usually just what they would like to think.

“You have had some great swimmers under you in the past is this the same formula that created them?”

All the swimmers coached by me have followed a Lydiard program. Toni Jeffs, Nichola Chellingworth, Jane Copland, Ossie Quevedo, Joseph Skuba, Andrew Meeder, John Foster and Rhi Jeffrey are fine swimmers that I have been privileged to help. Between them they won World and Olympic Championship medals, National and State Championships and held World Masters and National Records. The formula you saw on the white board is indeed the same one used to assist these swimmers.

“I know that Peter Snell would sneak out with the group to do extra ’speed’ sessions without Lydiard’s knowledge – is this what is happened?”

I think you will find this story is more legend than truth. I would never suggest that Snell did not run the occasional speed work session without Lydiard’s knowledge. However the program he followed was a full and traditional Lydiard schedule. Confirmation of this can be found in a book on Snell’s life after running published recently and written by Garth Gilmour. In the final chapter of the book, Snell is quoted as saying that his years as a sport’s scientist have made him increasingly convinced that Lydiard’s training was based on the soundest of training principles. His research had led him to the conclusion that he would change nothing. Neither would I.

By David

Swimwatch received two interesting items of correspondence recently from New Zealand Athletic Coaching Hall of Fame member, Arch Jelley. The first referred to a Swimwatch article published last week which said that quite a few Kenyan runners, “don’t even own a pair of running shoes until pretty late in their careers.” Arch’s photograph clearly shows that quite a few Kenyan runners do own a pair of running shoes. The photograph is also proof positive of the accuracy of another claim in last week’s Swimwatch post. It said Kenyan runners were the world’s best because “they run a lot.” Just take one look at the state of some of those shoes. There is no way shoes get into that condition without having traveled quite a few miles. When Alison was among the world’s best runners we used to count on a pair of shoes lasting 1000 miles. At 100 miles a week that’s a new pair of shoes each ten weeks. My guess is that quite a few of the shoes in this photograph have seen more that their 1000 mile quota; and probably in a lot less than 10 weeks.

I wonder if any of the shoes belong to David Rudisha? This week, in Rieti Italy, the amazing Kenyan lowered the world 800 meters track record. He went through the first 400 meters in 48.20 and held on to record 1:41.01. In March 2010 the New Zealand 400 meter national track title was won by Tim Jones in 48.43. David Rudisha was 0.23 faster at 400 and still had another lap to run. The aerobic conditioning required to run that fast through the first 400 and keep going means that while none of the shoes in the photograph may be his, he has undoubtedly owned several pairs that have ended up in a similar condition.

Mind you runners are not the only ones who store their personal sporting belongings badly. The photograph below was taken this morning in my team’s equipment storage room. As you can see too many swimmers are using the floor to store their gear instead of the carefully supplied wall hooks. Fortunately our swimming equipment doesn’t show the obvious signs of wear and caked-on dirt that the Kenyans have accumulated. I also imagine the Kenyans are doing many more miles in their sporting accessories. West Auckland’s swimmers are improving though. As their miles go up the appearance of the gear room may further deteriorate but their athletic performance will hopefully become more Kenyan.

The comparison between running and swimming was taken a step further by Arch Jelley’s second item of correspondence; a copy of a British news report on the effect of running on intelligence. Evidently neuroscientists at Cambridge University have shown that running stimulates the brain to grow fresh gray matter and has a big impact on mental ability. A few days of running led to the growth of hundreds of thousands of new brain cells that improved the ability to recall memories without confusing them, a skill that is crucial for learning and other cognitive tasks, researchers said.

The new brain cells appeared in a region of the brain that is linked to the formation and recollection of memories. The work revealed why running can improve memory and learning. They studied two groups of mice, one of which had unlimited access to a running wheel throughout. The other mice formed a control group. The running mice clocked up an average of 15 miles (24km) a day. Their scores in a memory test for mice were nearly twice as high as those of the control group.

Brain tissue taken from the rodents showed that the running mice had grown fresh grey matter during the experiment. Tissue samples from the dentate gyrus part of the brain revealed on average 6,000 new brain cells in every cubic millimeter. The dentate gyrus is part of the hippocampus, one of the few regions of the adult human brain that can grow fresh brain cells.

Arch felt his two news reports were related; the shoes being the means by which we could all achieve superior intelligence. He was unable to resist commenting under the Guardian’s news story, “I’m not sure if swimming does the same thing.”

Well I happen to know that not only does swimming do the same thing; it does it better. The Americans keep statistics on this sort of thing. Come to think of it, the Americans keep statistics on just about everything. When Jane was a sophomore at Washington State University, on a swimming scholarship, her team ranked first in the United States among all NCAA Division One swimming teams for academic performance. There were about 23 swimmers on the Washington State team reading a range of majors that included Zoology, English (that was Jane), Criminology and Education. Their combined Grade Point Average was an impressive 3.66 (that’s a standard American academic measure graded out of a maximum score of 4).

All this academic horse power in the Washington State swim team was marginally tarnished when Jane pointed out that the team still had to read the lettering above the record board when doing the chant that spelled out “Washington State”, letter by letter. But don’t tell Arch.

[from Jane: Hahaha, yes we did always look at the back wall of the pool and read off the letters, and even then, there were screw-ups every now and again.]

–> Good memories :)